


Maybe If I Fall Asleep

by addy_is_not_a_laddy



Series: The Fault In Our Strilondes (Starlightverse) [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 06:12:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4818116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addy_is_not_a_laddy/pseuds/addy_is_not_a_laddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose knows for a long time where and how she's doomed to die, that's not the problem.  The problem is when it doesn't stick.</p><p>Eventual Alpha!Rose Dolorosa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe If I Fall Asleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [callunavulgari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/gifts).



Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you’re getting ready to jump out of a plane.  Now, it’s a perfectly good plane, and strictly speaking you don’t have to jump out of it, but you really don’t fancy how likely you are to get soaking wet if you try to let the plane make a water landing.  Or rather, you aren’t too excited about the idea of how wet your typewriter and your tape recorder would get, which amounts to the same thing in the end.  You.  Here.  Jumping out of a plane.

It’s not your plane, of course.  You’re an as-of-yet undiscovered talent of the literary persuasion,  currently working on the first draft of your first story.  You’re not worried though; you’ve Seen how well it’ll do.

The plane belongs to Jade English (formerly Jade Crocker) of SkaiaNet Technologies, and a dear friend of yours even if today is the first time that you’ll meet in person.  You started writing her when you were a young girl, seven or eight, after a set of visions where you saw her childhood.  She never ridiculed you for what you said, or what you knew, and despite the difference in age she never treated you like a child, like a stupid child.  She helped you understand your visions, and never once chided you to keep your knowledge to yourself. It’s a gift you value, this trust in your common sense.

Of course, it wouldn’t probably go over well if you started insisting that Betty Crocker, beloved baking name and trademark, was a lying alien fish-woman.  Still, you remember your confusion when you saw your visions and most of them would be in a language you didn’t understand, and no matter your research not one that you could figure out.  In the end that was what inspired you to write Jade, and you have yet to regret it.

She arranged this whole shebang, the jet and everything, so that you could meet her well outside her mother’s territory.  Her adoptive brother is coming as well, and to say you’re excited would be an understatement.  You’ve been studying Alternian as best as you can with the tapes and lessons that Jade has made for you since you were a child, but you’re going to be spending a couple weeks here with her and her brother trying only to talk in Alternian.  It’s going to be a real test of your skill and your devotion, and you think that you’re not going to come out of it as well as you had hoped, but you won’t have a good way of knowing until you’re here a little while.

You suck in a deep breath, as you spot the island out the open jump-door and prepare yourself, your backpack strapped to your stomach, and your parachute on your back.  Despite knowing that Jade is going to be waiting for you at the bottom of the tree you will land in, you hesitate, fear pounding through your body.  You know where you’ll end up, but often the reality of what you have to do to get there is too far away, and the fact that you’ve already Seen what will happen doesn’t mean much to your instincts.  It doesn’t help that sometimes you See things that never were, and never will be, even if you can generally tell the difference between those visions and the ones that take place on this plane of existence.

You pull your ‘chute a bit earlier than perhaps you should have, but you land in the tree just as you knew you would, and grab the knife you prepared in your trusty backpack’s front pocket to cut yourself out of the mess and shrug off your parachute’s shoulder straps and flip your backpack onto your back.  You scale down the tree as fast as you dare, and at the bottom Jade is waiting just as you knew she would be.  For just a moment your are caught off guard by just how old she looks, so different from the dark-haired bright-eyed girl that you saw all that time ago in your childhood visions, arguing with her ‘mother’ about something-or-other in a language that would baffle you for months until you worked up the nerve to find this woman and talk to her.  You heard her voice in the many tapes she recorded to teach you Alternian, but it never really changed how you saw her in your mind, even after the vision where you saw her waiting for you.

Her hair is longer, grey, and her eyes are just as dark and quick, but they’re surrounded by folds and wrinkles that have been etched deep.  She grins at you in just the same way and you grin back with a fierce joy before surging forward and grabbing her in a hug with a desperation that takes you aback even though you’re the one giving it.  You could explain it away by saying that this is a woman you’ve been waiting to meet since you were a child, but mostly the feeling is like meeting a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.  You tuck that into the ‘probably to do with your strange other-planely visions’ box to think about later.  You’ll have plenty of time on this island, you think.

She’s talking to you from the moment that you’re done hugging, all of it in the language that she’s been teaching you.  You respond occasionally, and she corrects your pronunciation meticulously.  She’s barefoot, you notice on the way toward the big white laboratory. It suits her.  Her body hasn’t quite betrayed her yet, she’s strong even as she’s old, and she looks like trekking all over this island certainly helped her to stay in shape.  She starts telling a story to you about some things she found on the island, and you are glad for the pause just to let the sounds of the language wash over you.

Alternian has five different clicks, two more than Xhosa, one of the few languages you’ve found on earth with phonemic parallels to Alternian, and there’s three different trills, and it sounds so strange and at the same time so beautiful.  The vowels are unforgiving.

She doesn’t dumb it down either, even though you probably have the vocabulary of a young child at this point despite your best efforts.  The sounds are just a bit different in person, and you take careful note of the shape of her mouth as she says things so that you can improve your own pronunciation.  Sometimes you ask a question, short and halting since you haven’t had much opportunity for conversation.

She leads you to your room and lets you settle, assuring you she’ll be back in a few hours.  You settle in, and let a gentle vision about dinner wash over you.  

When you were a child and you started recognizing your visions as something separate from real life, you had to learn to categorize them.  It took you a while to separate them out properly, but you learned them by how they felt, how they tasted, and even then for a little while it was trial-and-error to understand which was which.  It was up to you to recognize the past, the now, the someday, and the someday-that-will-never-be.  The past was the quietest, no matter what you saw, because it was done and gone and immutable, the now was the greatest rush, and often the most difficult because by the time you Saw it, things were already past.  The Someday is a wild joy, a fierce hope, and also a bright fear, if you had to name it.  The somedays-that-will-never be are the bitterest, with rushes of yearning and sadness woven through.  Even so, sometimes the emotions you feel while you’re having the visions can muddy your feelings of what type they are, because of what you want them to be.

You think that if your vision omnifold didn’t refresh you to the most important things you need to See when you needed them, there would be a lot more things that you would miss.  You’re sure that there are small things that you miss, but they haven’t been the end of you, and if they were really important then your Vision would show them to you insistently until you took a hint.

You remember the days when you were hit by the past in wave after wave, watching the childhoods of two children raised by a creature that did not understand motherhood, nor humanity, nor even love in the same way that humans felt it.  You saw in that lonely adopted child the same sorts of things you saw in yourself, even if your adoptive mother was a paragon of humane (and human) compassion, especially in comparison.  Your loneliness was more because you realized that people wouldn’t believe you when you told them about what you Saw, frustration at being treated as stupid or crazy, and a childish hope that someone would accept you.  You saw John too, but he never seemed as deeply affected by the troubles of his life, and you know now that he’s a famous comedian so it seems that he’s just the kind of person not to let life circumstances get him down. You Saw an address, and you sent a letter to a woman so far away that by all rights it shouldn’t have been able to be delivered, and yet a scant few weeks later a reply was waiting in your mailbox from her, enthusiastic and kind, and accepting of the abilities you so outrageously claimed.  

It was the vision with the address that gave you your first taste of someday-that-could-be, little events that weren’t urgent or important, that you could make happen, or not, and it was entirely and only up to you to face whichever future you chose.  You’ve had other tastes of those somedays, and sometimes they’re not as nice, and sometimes you don’t take those chances, but you’re glad every day for the little girl you were, and her willingness to take a risk.  You’re not sure that the you of today would be willing, not in the same way.

Jade comes and gets you for dinner, some beast or other caught in the forest, and some fresh fruit.  Afterwards she leads you back down the mountain through the forest to the beach, where John will be shortly arriving.  Halfway to the beach you collapse, only realizing in retrospect why the ground was suddenly so much closer.  The vision takes you hard and fast, leaving no room for the rest of you to function.  It’s so vivid it might as well be happening, you can feel your heart beating frantically.

Your wrists ache, and you’re clutching a set of knitting needles for dear life, a ball of yarn under your arm.  Your hands and arms itch from dried blood that also coats your needles, flaking off unevenly, in front of you is a demon, of sorts.  It’s Jade and John’s mother, but no longer wearing her costume of humanity.  Her eyes are too-bright fuchsia on too-dark grey skin, a grin wide and full of teeth straight out of a horror movie.  Everything about her reminds you of an anglerfish, and you can feel your resignation to what’s about to happen, but you have something to say first.  You can feel the finality of the scene, next to you is a man you have never seen before,and an aching sadness with every beat of your heart that you’ll never see him again.  Never see anything again after this hateful woman.

She kills him first, faster than you can blink she’s snatched his shitty sword from his hand and shoved it through his chest with such force that it snaps.  You watch, and you can’t help the keening cry that comes from your mouth, but you can watch and witness.  When she turns to you, you are ready to speak.  Your words are careful, for all that you’ve practiced.  You want her to kill you in uncertainty, plant the seed of fear.  When it grows, it’ll help destroy her, the ones who sent her, and give your daughter the time to be able to escape.  Just a few minutes more, it’s all she needs.

“Oh, Meenah.  It’s already too late.”  Your tongue twists around the words, and you can feel your throat trying to close around them.  You have to say them, you can’t mourn, even if he’s bleeding out in front of you.  Even if you can hear him choking, choking and gasping, and you can feel his eyes burning into you.  “Your empire was doomed the moment it was yours, everything you touch eventually turns to dust.”

She screams rage at you, all the clean grace of before blurred into lines of fury.  You don’t feel her fork go through you, but you feel as she yanks back it out of your chest.

You roll on your side, ignoring her now.  You’ve done your duty, and now you have the last thing you want.  Dave’s still there, watching, gasping, waiting, and now reaching.  Your hand curls with his for a moment, soft and weak, and you can hear the sounds around you dull, see your sight and your Sight blacken at the edges.  The cold starts pulling at you and you can’t breathe.  You can’t breathe.  It’s cold.

And then you’re back, jerking up and cracking your head on Jade’s chin.  You choke, take a deep breath start crying, and she’s back next to you, holding you, and only rubbing her jaw absently.  Your head probably hurt before you hit it, but it aches more now, and you hold Jade as tight as you can without hurting her.  She mutters nonsense words under her breath, stroking your back and patting you gently, and eventually you get your breathing under control.  Once you’re sure you have your voice back you recite the words exactly as you heard them, your voice flat and your brow furrowed in concentration.  You don’t understand fully what you’ve said, but you can tell that Jade does, by how she stiffens and pulls back from the hug to stare you in the eyes.  She examines you carefully for a moment, briefly touching a small bump on your forehead, before standing up slowly and stretching out.  She reaches out and practically lifts you to your feet, her strength astounding even if she was fifty years younger.

You just Saw your death.  It’s far away yet, but it’s the one thing that all your reading about seers didn’t prepare you for.  Everything you’ve read told you that your death was the one thing, the one sacred thing you would never have to bear.  You walk with Jade silently, and when you reach the beach you stand well back, farther than Jade does.  You aren’t sure the last time that Jade and John have seen each other in person, but you’re glad that they’re finally going to make up for the things that happened all those years ago after Meenah killed Halley.  Jade thinks of them a lot more than John does, and even if John missed Jade for running away he never blamed her like she blamed herself.

Jade starts talking, telling a story about some silly thing she and John did when they were children, and you can tell she’s nervous.  You listen with half an ear to her graceful Alternian, and watch a gentler vision in your mind’s eye. The way that your visions normally come, you see them like this.  That was the first, and you’re sure the last, where you were so fully disabled by your Sight.  His name is Dave, hair as impossibly bright as yours, against night-dark skin.  He’s on the street, only a child, rapping awkwardly for change, clearly homeless.  He’s wearing a pair of dirty half-broken sunglasses only barely held together by duct tape, and he’s painfully thin.  He manages to get a few dollars before a police car drives by and he makes a quick retreat into a network of alleyways that tells you he’s an old hand at avoiding cops.

Jade stops talking, which distracts you more than the vision, and your eyes snap to her instead of focusing blankly on a point across the bay.  Now that you’re paying better attention you can hear the whine of a plane’s engines, and you follow her line of sight to the speck on the horizon getting closer fast.  You take a few more steps back, and she takes another eager step forward.  When the plane splashes down she gets drenched, and you can’t hear a thing, but you only barely get misted by the water.  Jade, on the other hand, is in the middle of the splash zone and gets thoroughly drenched.  She is coughing, sputtering, and flipping John the bird by the time that the plane has coasted close enough to shore to be roped to the pier.  John steps out jauntily and gives Jade a saucy wink, which she flips another bird at.

When he starts talking, you hear the difference in their Alternian.  Hers is fantastic, but his is flawless in every way.  The weeks you spend on that island feel like a dream. No matter that they are years your senior, there’s something about them that is just comfortable familiarity, and they’re more siblings than seniors.  There’s a fierce joy that comes with the time you spend with them, and the small adventures you have on the island while you practice your Alternian.  By the time that you leave you have many tapes filled with new work to do, and a new appreciation for pranks and how to avoid them.  You also have several more chapters of your book completed, and you feel more weightless and giddy than you have in a long time, even as you feel the years ready to press down on you.  It doesn’t matter so much, the things that you know are coming, if you can remember to live in the now that you have been given.

\--

It takes you three grueling months from the day you get back until you finish the first draft of your book.  Then, you have to steadily edit it into shape, obfuscating your hints once, then twice, until they’re such a meandering labyrinth of words that you’re sure only the most dedicated of fan can puzzle out your true meaning, let alone explain it.  Every word, every period, every pause, they all have purpose.  

You finally send a copy of the finished manuscript to the publisher you know will snag it and never let go, and within another month you are signing a contract for the whole series, royalties, and even an advance on your next book.

Sometimes, when you’re sorting out the whirlwind that is your life, you think about the boy you saw surviving, and the man you saw dying.  You don’t wonder what he was to you, you already know from how you felt in the vision, but sometimes you wonder where he is.  Occasionally you get snatches of his life, he’s still terrible at rapping, but he’s getting better, and he’s less skinny.  He’s also a fast runner, you have yet to see him get caught.  You think that if he was you would make a point of springing him and getting his name off reports.

Your book is released amid a flurry of acclaim, ads running months before the official release of the book, complete with glowing reviews from such illustrious publications as the New York Times.  It’s thrilling to do so well so quickly, but it’s also tiring.  Mastering the quick-slow step of trying to figure out exactly what your visions want from you while also keeping a semblance of control over your life is difficult in the extreme, and some days you feel like you can’t even dictate what you’ll have for breakfast.  You don’t wonder how you would have done without the visions, because you know that you wouldn’t have done anything.  You wouldn’t be who you are without them, and it’s not worth worrying about what never was.

You study Alternian every day, and you talk on the phone with Jade or John whenever you can.  You even meet up with John when his tours take you near to book signings or you decide to take a trip to visit him.  He’s often on tour, with his book tour, prank tour, comedy show, or whatever thing he’s gotten it into his head to do, when he’s not consumed with the busy work of avoiding the responsibilities his mother tries to put on him.

You wonder that she’s still trying to pin him down after all these years.  Where Jade ran rather than break, John bends.  He’s more than just reeds in the winds, he is the winds.  The batterwitch has had as much success containing him as she would with trying to trap wind in gauze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! This story is technically second in my series, but actually runs concurrent with It's Where My Demons Hide. You don't need to have read the first to understand the second, but only because especially in the beginning they don't cross paths that much. The reason that this is being posted now instead of after the end of IWMDH is because that story is actually going to reach this one very soon, and it's easier for me to post this one and have it out of the way, and then write that part of that one. That story is pretty much on hiatus while I am updating this one.
> 
> For reference, this story starts in the early 90's/late 80's so the technology has to be on par with that. That being said, it advances rather quickly to and past the modern era.
> 
> Check out my tumblr, addynotladdy. Usually I will post on there before I post a new chapter on ao3. 
> 
> To callunavulgari, though the original prompt that inspired this fic is nearly 3 years old by now, perhaps you'll enjoy that I eventually wrote it anyway. Thanks again for the pale FefMeenah, I still reread it sometimes and grin like hell.


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